The music of my name
I spent decades letting people say it wrong. What changed.
The Simplicity Protocol July 28
0:00
/189.08102
I remember the first time someone said my name exactly right at a conference.
MarEEEEsa. The accent lands on the i. The whole name lifts.
Most people say Mur-IH-suh. The two S's do that. My dad found the name in a Spanish textbook and then inexplicably added an S (it was the 1980s), and that extra letter is enough to make people assume it isn't Spanish at all.
Growing up, I never corrected anyone. Teachers flattened it. I learned early that correcting people made them uncomfortable, so I stopped. Little Marissa absorbed the lesson: make yourself easy to pronounce. I have decades' worth of colleagues and friendships who never even knew my real name.
That's a small thing. And it's the kind of small thing that compounds across decades into a habit you no longer recognize as a concession.
The name was still mine. Yet I'd lent it out so many times that the original started to sound foreign, even to me. The music of it was my truth: the way my mom said it, or my dad, or our neighbor Lillian.
Every version of yourself you made easy for others to consume is still yours to reclaim.
This post is for subscribers only
Subscribe to continue reading